BulGae "Fire Dog" Timelapse + Process

Hello everyone! Hope you're having a great week!Today I'd like to go over the process for my BulGae drawing:

Background

This drawing was an entry to a contest on Steemit, a really awesome blogging platform based in crypto, which I will eventually dedicate its own blog post to because it deserves it. Wow, what a sentence.In the interest of transparency, you can read the original contest post here and my submission post here on Steemit. But in the interest of convenience and summary, stay right here and keep reading!The prompt for the contest was to draw an imaginary dog creature, inspired by 2018 being the Year of the Dog in Chinese/East Asian zodiac. It also had to be drawn using mostly dry traditional media. Pens/markers okay, paints not so much.My immediate thought was to draw a BulGae. Now for reference if you aren't Korean or familiar with Korean mythology: a BulGae literally translates to Fire Dog, which is literally what they were! Giant dogs of fire that were sent to bite off bits of the sun and moon to bring back to the Kingdom of Darkness, because all they wanted was a little bit of light. Of course, the sun and moon were too hot or cold, so the dogs always let go and came back empty handed. This myth was used to explain solar and lunar eclipses, with the hidden parts of the celestial bodies being where the dogs were supposedly biting.Image SourceNow because I'm a nerd and my family had a book of Korean folktales and myths, I had read this story several times throughout my youth. I was also recently reminded of it last year when a friend of mine mentioned the Chinese version, featuring a dog that was always hungry and decided the moon was a tasty snack, which resulted in lunar eclipses. So I didn't have to do much research, other than refreshing my memory of the myth, and searching for a real dog to reference.To my surprise, there is actually a breed of dog in Korea called BulGae, no doubt inspired by the myth. They're basically stockier Jindos with dark red fur, in this case the "fire" being more of a superficial description than a literal thing. It was insanely difficult to track down an exact image, but thanks to Wikipedia's handy citations, I was able to track one down.Image SourceTotally looks like he's made of fire, right?

Thumbnailing

So my first step in any drawing nowadays is to thumbnail it out!For art newbies, thumbnailing is the act of drawing quick, small sketches to figure out your drawing. They're not supposed to be super detailed or polished. For me I use them to figure out my pose, scale, layout, even values. It also helps to get the not so great ideas out of the way until you find the right one. I didn't start doing them as much until recently, which was a huge mistake because it is such a helpful step, and one that I do in all my major drawings now.For such a small amount of effort up front, it has huge rewards in the end, and I highly recommend it to any artist at any stage in their development. Seriously.Here's a poorly lit shot of the thumbnails I did for this piece. I started off just trying to figure out how to draw the dog, then moved on to different poses I wanted to try, as well as possible ways to ink and illustrate the fire.You can see the pose I eventually chose at the bottom right corner. I was inspired by my earlier attempts to teach my own dog what "ball" meant as well as fetch. I'm still not sure if he gets it and is just stubborn, or if he's really clueless. I thought the moment would play nicely here, and drew the ball as a little sun instead. The mythology adds another layer to the drawing, as I imagine a BulGae would be very hard-pressed to retrieve a flaming ball of gas that already burned its mouth earlier, no matter how much its master asked.

Inking

No photos here, but I've got something better: a timelapse!https://youtu.be/oDYUB6TO60kI did most of my inking with a Fine-tipped Faber Castell PITT artist pen. I didn't want my lines to be super thin, but not that thick either. I find it's best to line your art thinner than you want, then add onto the line weight afterwards for controlled definition and dynamics. Unfortunately the video cuts off just before the coloring/finagling part, but I used a brush pen for the large dark areas and just drew over parts of the dog's body that I wanted to stand out more for depth. A few details later, and we have the final product you saw in the beginning!

Results

I ended up winning 2nd place in the contest (yay!) and won a couple cryptocoins as a reward :) Of course, the real reward is that I drew something cute, and that I'm semi-confident in my ability to draw a Jindo/Shiba-esque doggo.Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed learning about my process. If you liked the timelapse, I have a full, unedited version with commentary available on my Patreon! (still missing the final inking tho T-T) Don't forget to sign up for more art!